Stubborn, disagreeable creature, she thought.
One mile blurred beneath Shaker’s hard little feet, then two, then three. The wiry mare didn’t even breathe hard. She could lope at that pace all day long.
Occasionally Sarah looked over her shoulder to check on Case’s progress. Each time she did, Cricket was in the same place, about a hundred feet back. The stallion showed no sign of tiring, even though he was carrying easily twice the weight the mustang was.
Irritating males, she thought uncharitably. Thick of limb and thin of brain.
But it was hard for her to sustain her bad mood in the face of the golden light that came washing over the land. Between rosy clouds, the sky was a blue so pale it shone like clear glass in the dawn.
How can I leave this land? she asked silently.
It was a question that had come often to her in the days since she had made her bargain with Case. The only answer she had was the same one that had gotten her through the months after her parents had died.
I will do what I must. For Conner, who deserves better than life gave him.
She had never regretted the choices forced on her by circumstance. She was simply grateful that she and Conner had survived when too many others had not.
After the sun peeked over the canyon rim, the land slid by in countless shades of ochre and rust, red and gold. She slowed only when one of Lost River Canyon’s many side canyons opened onto the river’s edge. Then she let the mustang pick a careful way through the slickrock, boulders, and dry creek beds that marked the mouth of each smaller canyon.
Case’s pale green eyes roved the countryside constantly. He wasn’t just looking for danger. He was memorizing landmarks from every angle so that he would be able to find his way back over the trail without a guide.
As he learned the land, he marked the flight of eagles and hawks, the bursting speed and sudden stillness of rabbits, and the abundant sign of deer. Once he was certain he saw cougar tracks hardened in a patch of dry mud at the mouth of a side canyon.
Half of this is mine.
That fact kept echoing through him with every new sign of life, every wild new vista. Each time the realization came, he felt a measure of calm touch parts of his soul that had known only turmoil since the war.
The certainty that he belonged to the land grew greater with every moment, every breath.
He would die, but the land would not.
The land would go through eternity untouched by the hell that lived within the worst of men.
For Case, the land’s unchanging reality offered the possibility of a calm that was more than skin deep. Through his bond with the land, he was part of something greater than the sum of all evil caused by men.
The thought was balm for an agony that had known no ease for so long that he had stopped noticing it; he simply accepted agony as men who had lost limbs learned to live without them.
When Sarah finally reined in her mustang to a walk, he let Cricket come alongside the little mare.
“Nothing like a little run to work off your temper,” he said casually.
She gave him a narrow look and said nothing.
“Need a few more miles?” he asked. “This time you carry the saddle.”
As always, her sense of humor won out over her irritation. She laughed and shook her head.
“You and Conner,” she said.
“What about us?”
“You both can get around me in no time at all.”
“That’s because you’re not hard enough for this world,” Case said.
She groaned. “Not you, too.”
“What?”
“Ute believes I’m an angel,” she said.
Case didn’t look at all surprised.
“I mean it,” she said. “He truly does.”
“A man wakes up sick and hurting and sees lantern light shining around your hair and feels your hands all cool and gentle on his skin…”
His voice died. Then he shrugged.
“Ute can hardly be blamed for seeing you as a sweet angel of mercy bending down to touch him,” Case said.
Sarah flushed.
“I’m no angel,” she said. “Ask my brother.”
“Oh, I’m not doubting you. It’s Ute who needs convincing.”
“I’ve tried. It’s like trying to talk Shakespeare to a rock.”
“You have to remember that Ute is comparing you to the other women he has known,” Case said dryly.
She winced.
“Lola is a good woman,” she said. “Hard, but decent.”
“You’ve got that half-right,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Big Lola is a legend in some parts.”
“That was then,” Sarah said firmly. “Since she came to Lost River ranch, she hasn’t done anything that needs apology. Except cursing, and that doesn’t count. Not really.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled.
“Cussing doesn’t count?” he asked neutrally. “Well, that explains it.”
“What?”
“An angel of mercy with a vocabulary that could scorch hell. Of course, I only heard that at secondhand. Could be an outright falsehood.”
Her cheekbones burned with more than the crisp winter air.
“I said I wasn’t an angel,” she pointed out.
The suggestion of a smile deepened around his eyes.
Sarah kept glancing at him, but no matter how often she tried, she couldn’t see if Case was actually smiling.
“I should have shaved you,” she said.
“Why?” he asked, surprised by the change of subject.
“I swear you’re smiling underneath all that chin fur, but I can’t tell for certain.”
“It’s too cold to go without fur” was all he said.
“It wouldn’t be too cold if you slept in the cabin.”
She didn’t know why it still rankled her that he had moved out of the cabin, but it surely did.
“I spent too long in your bed as it was,” he said bluntly.
What he didn’t say was that her rose-scented bedcovers haunted his dreams even when he slept outside. He woke up as hard as the cliffs. When the savage ache finally subsided, it was never for long. It ambushed him at the most inconvenient moments.
Such as now.
Cursing silently, he shifted in the saddle.
It was useless. In his condition there just wasn’t any comfortable way to ride.
“Why don’t you sleep next to Conner?” she asked. “There’s plenty of room near the stove.”
“Your brother thrashes around like a young bull.”
“But what are you going to do when it snows?”
“What I always have.”
“Which is?” she asked.
“Survive.”
The single bleak word went into Sarah like a blade of ice.
“There’s more to life than survival,” she said.
“Yes. There’s the land.”
“I meant hope and laughter and love.”
“They die with people. The land doesn’t. It endures.”
His look and his tone said that the subject was closed.
For a time she was silent. In the end, her curiosity about his past was too great.
“What happened?” she asked baldly.
“When?”
“Why don’t you have hope and laughter and love?”
Case didn’t answer.
“Is it something to do with Emily?” Sarah asked. “Did she run off with another man and break your heart?”
His head whipped around toward her. The look in his eyes would have frozen flame.
“What did you say?” he asked softly.
Her mouth went dry. She wished she had never let curiosity get the better of common sense. She swallowed, tried to speak, and swallowed again.
“You called her name,” Sarah said. “When you were out of your mind with fever. Over and over. Emily, Emily, Em—”
“Don’t ever say th
at name to me again,” he interrupted savagely.
Silence expanded like the wind, filling the land.
“Is she dead?” Sarah asked finally.
There was no answer. Case didn’t even so much as look her way.
The pain she felt surprised her.
Well, she thought, I guess that answers one of my questions. Case loved Emily and she betrayed him.
“All women aren’t like that,” Sarah said.
The silence kept expanding.
Suddenly she was glad that she hadn’t shaved Case. She didn’t want any better idea of what he was thinking than she already had.
“Fine,” she said. “Close up like a bear trap. But hasn’t anyone ever told you that talking about something can ease the pain?”
He gave her a sideways look.
“So tell me about your marriage, Mrs. Kennedy,” he said, his tone sardonic. “What was so awful that you decided never to ‘suffer’ a man again?”
“That’s none of—” Abruptly her mouth snapped shut.
“—my business?” he finished smoothly. “Then why is what did or didn’t happen to me your business?”
Again silence competed with the wind.
In the end, silence won.
When Sarah finally reined her little mare up into a side canyon, she hoped that Case’s thoughts were happier than hers.
But she doubted it.
“I suppose there’s a reason you chose this canyon out of all the others we’ve passed,” he said, breaking the long silence.
“Yes.”
“Mind telling me why, or is that another thing that’s none of my business?”
She looked sideways at Case. Her eyes were the color of hammered silver. Her voice wasn’t any warmer.
“There are ruins halfway up on the south side,” she said distinctly. “There are also fingers of red rock where the canyon branches up toward the rim.”
“What kind of ruins?”
“Like castles, only different.”
“Well, that tells me a whole lot. Now I know exactly what I’m looking for.”
“What you’re looking for is a good dressing-down,” she muttered.
He simply turned and watched her with eyes that were far too wintry for a man who otherwise looked only a few years older than Sarah herself.
Suddenly she felt weary all the way to her soul. Her thoughtless questions had transformed Case into a cold stranger rather than the intriguing man she had brought back from death with her hands and her prayers and sleepless nights. A man whose dry humor and gentleness hinted at possibilities she didn’t even name.
But she knew they existed.
She had sensed them as clearly as she sensed his male hunger for her.
Never mind that, she told herself. Never mind who Emily was or what she did to Case. It doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters but finding the silver for Conner. He knows how to laugh and love and hope.
“Hal had an old map,” Sarah said.
“How old?”
She shrugged. “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”
“Was it just a drawing or were there words?”
“A few here and there. And a letter.”
“What did it say?” Case asked, curious despite himself.
“That a pack train of silver crosses, coins, bars, cups, plates, candle holders, and rosaries was lost during a flood.”
“A whole pack train?”
She nodded.
“Most of the worked silver was recovered by the Spanish,” she said, “but ten bags of silver coins weren’t found. About three hundred pounds of silver bars were never seen again either.”
He whistled softly. Then he ran a speculative eye over the immense, rugged land around him and called himself a fool for even being interested.
Three hundred pounds of silver bullion could vanish into any one of the thousands of nameless little canyons and never cause a ripple. The land was built on the scale of eternity rather than man.
“Were the words in Spanish or English or French or Latin?” he asked, curious despite himself.
“Latin mostly,” she said. “Some Spanish.”
“Are you certain?”
“The man who wrote the letter was a Jesuit priest,” she said distinctly. “Latin was the preferred language for church documents, although some correspondence was in an ancient form of Spanish.”
His dark eyebrows rose. “Your husband must have been quite a scholar to figure out that letter.”
“Hal couldn’t read or write English, much less anything else.”
“Who translated the letter?”
“I did.”
Case made a satisfied sound, as though he finally had run some prey to ground.
“You know Latin,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Greek?”
“Yes.” She looked over at him. “Surprised?”
“Only that you’re still at Lost River ranch.”
“What do you mean?”
“With your education, you could get a job teaching school in Denver or Santa Fe or San Francisco.”
Sarah felt her throat contract and her face stiffen.
She didn’t want to live in the cities where her learning would be valued. All she wanted was to live on her ranch with the wild canyons and the sweet water and the timeless wind singing to her soul.
But it’s my land only until I find the silver, she reminded herself. Then my half of the ranch belongs to Case.
“I could,” she agreed.
Her tone said that she would rather be in chains.
“Where is the map now?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“A secret, huh?”
“No. I simply don’t know,” she said evenly. “The last time I saw it—and Hal—was years ago in autumn when he went looking for silver.”
“He never came back?”
“No.”
“How did he die?” Case asked.
“I don’t know.”
“But you’re certain he’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“My brother backtracked Hal and found him dying. Conner buried him where he lay.”
“Seems kind of strange that a man in his prime would just up and die,” Case said neutrally.
“Hal was more than three times my age.”
He gave Sarah a swift sideways look. He tried to imagine someone with her quick tongue and gift of laughter being married to a man old enough to be her grandfather.
No wonder she doesn’t want to talk about it, he thought uneasily. I doubt that a man that old had much patience with girlish ways.
“I’m surprised your brother didn’t bring back the map,” he said after a time.
“He brought back what we needed to survive—the horse, the overcoat, the supplies, and the weapons.”
Case pictured the Kennedy cabin in his mind. Ten feet by fourteen. Ill-made. No window glass. No floor but dirt that Sarah drew whimsical designs on when she wasn’t too tired from spinning and cooking and washing and nursing various creatures.
Without the touches that she brought to the cabin—the herbs drying in one corner, the scented sprigs of juniper tucked in the mattresses, the smell of cornbread and fresh laundry—without them the cabin would have been about as welcoming as a grave.
“Must have been pretty tough for you with a young boy to raise and no man to help out,” Case said.
“Conner learned to be a fine hunter. I’m a fair shot myself.”
“What about your husband?”
“Hal was gone treasure hunting a lot of the time. He expected food on the table when he came back.”
That wasn’t all her husband had expected. She didn’t think about the rest of it anymore, except sometimes in the middle of the night, when she would wake up cold and sweating with fear.
“How long did Hal look for silver before he died?” Case asked.
She shrugged. “All the time I knew
him and some years before that, I suppose.”
“That map must have been worth less than a hill of beans.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t find anything.”
“Hal drank.”
The stark words told Case more than anything else Sarah had said about her husband.
“When he sobered up,” she said, “he didn’t remember anything that had happened.”
“Are you telling me that you think he found the treasure and then forgot it?”
“Yes.”
“A man would have to be pretty damned drunk to forget finding a treasure.”
“When Hal was drinking, he was blind, deaf, and dumb as a rock,” she said grimly.
Case watched her out of the corner of his eye. From what he had gathered in the past weeks, she was no older than twenty, and maybe younger.
Yet when she talked about her husband, she looked as worn as a widow twice her age.
“If Hal found the treasure,” he said after a while, “then lost it again, the map won’t do you much good, will it?”
“There’s no ‘if’ about it. I know Hal found the treasure.”
The certainty in Sarah’s voice stopped Case. He turned in the saddle and stared at her.
“How do you know?” he asked bluntly.
She took off one of her deerskin gloves and dug into the pocket of her pants. After a moment she held out her hand to him.
Two crudely cut silver reales lay against her palm. Despite the tarnish brought on by age, silver gleamed through the black where someone had polished a part of each coin.
“Do you want to change your mind about taking half the treasure instead of half the ranch?” she asked.
He looked from the ancient coins to the wild, untouched land surrounding him.
“No,” he said. “This country has something that money can’t buy. You can have the silver.”
I don’t want it, Sarah thought bleakly. Like you, I only want the land.
Yet half of the ranch she loved belonged to Conner.
And all too soon the other half would belong to a man who didn’t believe in laughter, hope, or love.
11
A cold, clean wind blew down the canyon. The riverbed Sarah and Case were using as a trail lacked water except for occasional shallow pools. Despite that, grass and shrubs flourished at the margins of the dry wash and on up the steep slope to the point where the sheer stone cliffs began.
Winter Fire Page 14